by Sierra Dean
“I don’t care if it’s a baby, you morons. Pay attention! A girl is just as capable of killing you. Think of the queen.”
Now that they knew I was here I didn’t see a point in playing it subtle anymore. I grabbed Hollis’s head again. He was staring right into my face, but his eyes were unfocused, not seeing what was right in front of him until I snarled.
The sound was ragged and frightening even to me. It was the snarl of an animal that had no natural sense of fear, a hollow, almost rabid noise of warning. His eyes widened and his mouth went slack. He tried to pull away, but my grip was firm and unyielding. He would not escape me again. Hollis grabbed my arms, scratching at the skin in desperation. I growled deeper. The big guard was moving out of the back corner now, and I twisted Hollis in my grip, using one arm to hold him by the neck as I pulled out a gun and flicked off the safety. I aimed it at the main guard who was only a few feet from us.
Hollis went limp and I let him fall to the floor. Now it was just me and Andre the Giant. I’d been lucky to find the breaker switch, so I guess it was asking too much to make the biggest, scariest bastard in the room an easy target. If I’d been able to take him out first thing, I’d be waltzing into Marcus’s room right now.
Instead I was leveling my gun across a two-foot gap and pointing it at his abdomen. Geez, this guy was massive.
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, because he was staring straight at me.
“I know you,” he said, no fear in his voice in spite of the incapacitated figures littering the ground around us. “You’re Lucas’s new mate. You’re the girl all this trouble is about.”
“I hardly think I’m the reason Marcus and Alexandre Peyton are trying to take control of this city.”
“Oh, no?”
I was hoping my flicker of uncertainty went unnoticed, because I was getting more and more unnerved by how calm he was with my gun pointed at him. He inched forward, and I loaded another bullet into the chamber.
“What do you think you’ll accomplish by killing Marcus? Do you think he’s the only one who threatens you and your king? Take my advice, princess”—never had the word sounded so condescending—“stay out of Lucas’s life. Stay away from the big dogs.”
“I’m not here for Marcus. He’s just a bonus.”
“Ha.” The sound was humorless. “You’re here because Peyton wants you here.”
“You expect me to believe that someone like you knows a damn thing about Alexandre Peyton’s plan?” I stepped backwards, but he kept coming. He was advancing slowly, but there was no mistaking the minute movements. I steadied my hands and raised my gun a few inches so it was even with his sternum.
“I know more than you can imagine.” His voice told me otherwise. The bravado was gone, replaced with wavering uncertainty. I’d hit the nail on the head. He had no clue about Peyton’s plans.
“You don’t know anything,” I said.
He snarled and moved to close the small space between us.
I shot him.
I might have wanted to hear him out if he’d claimed to be privy to what Marcus’s plan of action was, because it was feasible the alpha could have trusted him. But I didn’t believe for one second Peyton would let a werewolf, even the leader of the guards, be privy to his real agenda. I doubted Marcus himself knew the details of what Peyton had in mind.
If this had really been the plan, the vampire would have wanted me here at night when he could kill me on his own. He was such a ham he’d want it to be showy and over the top, and he wouldn’t want to miss it. Opening the doors to Marcus’s bedchamber in the middle of the afternoon would not be a part of anyone’s plan but my own.
Alone at last, I gave a hard tug on the door they’d been guarding. “Little pig, little pig, let me in.” The door was locked from the inside, and through the wood I heard someone scrambling. Then the door swung open abruptly and I staggered backwards, almost tripping over one of the still forms on the floor.
Marcus stood at the end of a bed, butt naked, with a shotgun pointed at me. After dispatching nine unarmed guards, I hadn’t expected anyone to have a weapon. We locked eyes from across the room, and my heart skipped a beat as he pulled the fore-end towards him with a deafening click.
“Pleasure to see you again, Miss McQueen. It’s a shame you can’t stay.” He aimed at my chest and fired.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Either I was dreaming again or I was dead.
I was lying in bed, naked. A tangle of buttery-soft sheets that smelled like sun-dried linen kept me modest from the waist down, and a male arm covered my breasts. I rubbed my face against a downy pillow, breathing in the smell of sunlight that made my eyes water.
Lucas, naked next to me, opened his eyes and fixed his blue irises on my brown ones.
“I’ve never been here,” I whispered.
He wiped a tear away from my eye. “Pink?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.” When he stuck his thumb in his mouth, I cringed. “Blood?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you, Secret?” Where, not what. His question surprised me.
“Not here.”
He pulled me near, and the line of our touching bodies made my skin explode with heat. He buried his fingers into my hair and brought my face close to his.
“This is real,” he told me.
“No.”
“You are dying.”
“I am?” I hated dreams. Especially when I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn’t make myself behave like I should. I kissed him and tried to push my conscious sense away so I could just be naked in bed beside him. His hands slipped down to the small of my back, and he returned my kiss with renewed vigor.
Then he seemed to register what we were doing and pulled back. We were always stopping short of the good stuff.
“Secret, focus.”
“I was focused.” My eyes were closed, my mouth trailing down his neck.
“No. You need to tell me where you are.”
I kissed his clavicle, grazing it with my teeth. “I’m with you.”
He was getting frustrated; I could tell by the heaviness of his sigh. “You are dying.”
“You’re killing me,” I quipped.
Before I could make another pun, something in my stomach twisted and pain seared through me. It started as a throbbing ache, and I made a whimpering sound. I looked down and saw the cream-colored sheets turning red.
“Like my wedding dress.”
I began to cough violently, expelling something hard from my gut. It clicked against my teeth, and he reached between my lips, pulling out a bullet.
When I scrutinized my own body, I saw a gaping hole beneath my ribs where blood was spilling out. Pain rocked through me like angry waves battering a ship at sea, and my breath was sucked from my lungs. I looked to him for help.
“Lucas? Why?”
He grabbed my face to keep me from looking at the blood. “Where are you?”
I screamed back, but only because it felt like I was being ripped open from the inside.
“The Or-Orph-pheum.” I was beginning to shiver, my teeth chattering. “Lucas?” I looked at him with pink tears streaming down my face as I fought to breathe. “I’m so sorry. I want to be here.”
“You will be.”
“I’m dying.”
And then he was gone and I was alone in a widening pool of my blood. Pain shot through the whole of my being, and I knew I wasn’t dreaming anymore.
“She’s coming to,” Marcus said.
I felt fingers withdraw and realized they had just been inside my body. A pitiful, keening noise echoed in the air. It too had just been inside me.
Red fog slipped from my eyes, leaving me looking at a low ceiling in a poorly lit room. Everything came back in tiny shards. The Orpheum, the guards, Marcus and the gun.
Another agonized sob escaped my throat. On instinct I scrambled for a weapon, but my hands were empty and when I tried to move them they were heavier than anch
ors. I could barely lift them from the floor. My rib cage was punctured, just as it had been in the dream. I didn’t need to see the hole to know it was there; it felt like someone was shredding me open from the inside. There should be more wounds from the spray of the buckshot, but I could only feel the one. I tried to take a deep breath but was left sputtering. Only the left side of my chest rose when I tried, and there was a build up of pressure on the right side that made it feel like my body was caving in on itself. I whimpered, but even that hurt.
Marcus came into view, still nude, standing over me with an expression of triumph on his face.
“You bleed slowly. You’ve been out for hours.”
In all that time he couldn’t find a robe?
Something else sunk in. Hours? “N-night?” Saying the one word felt worse than any torture I’d ever endured. My throat was raw, and though every breath I took seared through me like a blitzkrieg, I couldn’t stop my labored panting.
“Oh she is clever, even as she dies,” someone else spoke up. This voice was more familiar than Marcus’s and sent a chill through my body and turned my bones to ice. No. Not this. “Her blood does smell delicious, doesn’t it?”
“No.” I couldn’t even breathe without wanting to black out, but still I tried to sit up. Dots of white light swam across my vision, and I was forced back down by a wave of nausea. Every inch of me thrummed and reverberated with the swell of hot, liquid pain, the way a thumb pulses after being struck by a hammer. “No.”
“She’s quite adamant, non? Apparently it is not night. Shall I return to my rest, then?” The vampire was laughing as if the whole situation was the funniest he had ever encountered. His face came into view over me.
I blinked several times to be sure it was really Peyton. He had not aged at all in six years, which was to be expected, but there was something different about him all the same. His hair was a dull rust color and fell in waves around his face. He peered down at me with soft brown eyes that reflected the laughter of his voice. When Peyton had been turned he’d probably only been sixteen or seventeen years old. He had the face of a boy on the verge of becoming a man and forever caught in between.
He was lovely, with a youthful roundness to his features. The paleness of his skin against the coppery hair made him look angelic. It was his smile that made the angel fall from grace and gave away the devil inside.
He stepped over me, placing one foot on either side of my legs, and crouched low, not kneeling so as to avoid getting my blood on his pants.
“Secret, it has been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Not.” My lips quivered, and I tried a few times to take a deep breath to finish the sentence. “Long.” A new sensation rolled over my body, replacing my torment with a cold nothingness. “Enough.”
“Haha!” He gave me an assessing once-over. “I am pleased Marcus and his queen abstained from finishing you off until nightfall.” He caressed my injured side, and I cried out again. “Very pleased.”
Peyton had always been a fan of playing with his food. It was one of the things that got him in serious trouble with the council before he’d gone rogue. His idea of play was more in line with the Marquis de Sade than sports and rec. Funny, but even on the verge of bleeding to death on a concrete floor, I still wasn’t in the mood to be penetrated by a sadist. Especially not when I had a gaping chest wound waiting for him to explore.
“I was interested to know how you came to be here in the daytime, my little dhampyr. But Marcus’s queen was able to provide me some enlightening insights.” His gaze was crawling over my body. “It seems the queen knows quite a lot about you, Miss McQueen.” When he looked at me, the malice in his eyes glittered like the joy of a child. Then he glanced to the side and fixated on someone else. “Isn’t that right, Ms. McQueen?”
While he spoke I had begun to drift, the fog of unconsciousness settling over me again, trying to protect me from the impossible hurt of being awake. I barely had time to be confused by his change of titles before someone jabbed a thumb deep inside the bullet wound on my side. I wailed, much to Peyton’s obvious delight, but the sound was dismantled by my ravaged throat and lungs and came out as a stuttering whistle. When I looked at the queen to whom he’d addressed with my own name, I couldn’t have hidden my shock if I’d been totally uninjured.
Kneeling next to me, as naked as her mate Marcus, was a beautiful woman about forty years old, with hair as curly as my own. Only hers was the dark brown color inherited from my grandfather. Her father.
“Mom?” She looked older than she had in the pictures I’d seen, and far less jovial. I looked from her cold face to the finger she had pressed knuckle-deep into my flesh, her nail scraping against my rib bone. “Mom.” Then I began to scream again.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Mercy, perhaps you could live up to your name a little, non? I thought perhaps we’d lost her that time.”
“A little pain won’t kill her. She’s a monster.”
“We’re all monsters here, Mercy,” Peyton said, laughing still.
When I came to, my breathing was so ragged and uneven that if I were not awake to hear it, I would have thought it had stopped altogether.
It dawned on me why they kept sticking their hands in my wound. It wasn’t only to inflict pain or for the pleasure it granted them. It kept my natural healing abilities from closing the hole, which was why only one gash remained open while the others had vanished. Continually jamming the bullet back in kept me from healing myself.
My mother’s finger was no longer inside me, and I was grateful for small kindnesses.
Peyton was still on top of me, tapping my face to lure me back to consciousness.
“They will s-st-stop you,” I said, but the threat lost any weight when a full-body tremor rattled my teeth.
“Who? The Tribunal? Yes, I can see they tried very hard to get me. Sending you alone.” He touched my cheek. “This was not about my death. This was about your death. If they wanted me dead, I’d be dead.”
I closed my eyes, unable to continue looking at his smug, victorious smile. He was wrong. He had to be wrong. I was here because Sig believed I could do this, however misguided he’d been. They didn’t want me dead.
Well, Juan Carlos wanted me dead, but he was hardly a majority vote.
No, this isn’t how Sig would have wanted me to go out. I couldn’t believe that, not after everything I’d done for him and the council. The Tribunal owed me something better than a death at the hands of Alexandre Peyton.
“Wrong,” I insisted.
He patted my cheek again, but this time it was more of a slap. “You are a foolish believer in the Tribunal even as they leave you to die. You are not one of them. They do not care if you live or die. You are meaningless to them. No one will miss you.”
From somewhere in the room I heard my mother laugh. “I should have killed you when you were born. I don’t know why I gave you to my idiot mother.”
Hearing her use such contemptuousness for the woman who had raised her and taken in her unwanted baby, the woman who had been the only light of kindness in my childhood, stirred something hot and angry in me. Rage proved to be a temporary distraction from the pain.
“Not dead yet.” My vision swam and the threat of blacking out was almost realized before I resisted the urge to slip back into the dark tides of inertia. If I didn’t find something in me that could fight back, I would die here and become nothing more than a fading afterthought to those I loved.
I didn’t know if I loved Lucas or if I loved Desmond. I didn’t know what Calliope meant when she told me I would be the center of more than one love triangle, or if I loved anyone at all. What I did know was if I bled to death beneath the Orpheum, I would never get a chance to figure out who I loved. I would never see Keaty again or stand next to Holden in my tiny kitchen.
I would never run through the woods of my grandmere’s property or feel the sweet, tingly allure of the full moon in my blood.
If I
didn’t fight back now and find some part of me willing to live, I would never do anything at all ever again.
With my mother across the room and Peyton occupying himself by telling me how little I mattered, my body had started fighting the injury. With a sensational amount of suffering on my part, muscles pulled themselves together, blood clotted where it once ran free and inch by inch the bullet was forced out, until it fell silently into a pool of my congealing blood. The surface wound was slower to heal, but I could feel it knitting itself, pore by pore, back into a smooth whole. I was, for once, glad to be so covered in blood. They wouldn’t notice right away that I was no longer leaking.
Fate had smiled on me. If I hadn’t taken Brigit to Calliope’s, I might have avoided this mess, but I also wouldn’t have fed. The blood I had taken at Calliope’s was probably the only thing that had kept me from dying, and now it was singing through my body, burning a path of energy and strength as it went.
Every part of me was attuned and hyper aware. I felt whole again, more awake, and I could appreciate my situation more completely.
Once I could feel things other than the gaping hole in my side, I was able to register something hard digging into the small of my back right where Lucas had touched me in my dream. It took me a fraction of a second to realize that it was my second gun.
They must have dragged me into the bedchamber after Marcus shot me, because if they’d lifted me they wouldn’t have missed it. They had removed the blade and bullets from my boots, but they hadn’t turned me over and looked for a second weapon. All I needed to do now was wait for the right moment. Soon Peyton would stop belittling me, grow weary of the games, and want to feed, and that would be easier if I was sitting up.
That’s when I’d make my move.
Until then I needed to focus on what he was saying and act like my pain kept me teetering on the edge of delusion.
“Not dead yet,” I repeated, this time a little louder.
“She’s got a lot of you in her.” Marcus laughed. Mercy didn’t seem to think it was so funny.
“She is nothing like me.”
